


First Light

by SuburbanSun



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Awkward Flirting, Espionage, F/M, Hydra Jemma Simmons, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 09:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14891798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuburbanSun/pseuds/SuburbanSun
Summary: When Jemma receives her next mark from her Hydra bosses, he's a familiar face. That should make completing the assignment easier-- shouldn't it?





	First Light

**Author's Note:**

> For an anon on Tumblr, who prompted: "jemma is hydra and fitz is shield. (pre-winter soldier when all that went down.) they are on an assignment to kill/seduce/spy on/whatever each other. sparks fly."
> 
> This was definitely a bit outside my comfort zone, so I hope you like it!

Jemma shut her apartment door with her hip as she rifled through her mail. Advertisement… bill… oh, she was apparently due for a teeth cleaning. Best to call the dentist’s office first thing in the morning; she’d never had a cavity in her life, and she wasn’t about to begin now.

As she switched on the lights, careful to scan all quadrants of the room for intruders as had become habit, she flipped to the last envelope in the stack-- an ominous black square with a red logo in place of a return address. She rolled her eyes. Her bosses needed to learn to be a bit more subtle.

She knew what it would contain: the name of another SHIELD scientist whom she’d be required to befriend, beguile, and betray, in no particular order. She’d been assured that the research Hydra continued to liberate (that was the word Whitehall had used: “liberate,” not “steal”) would only be used to protect people in a way that SHIELD was simply incapable, but it didn’t stop the spark of guilt in her chest as she slid her finger under the flap of the envelope.

That spark ignited into a flame when she read the name printed in red block letters on black cardstock. The boy she’d tried and failed to get to know when she was a young, fresh-faced prodigy at SHIELD Academy, before Whitehall had recruited her with tales of all the evil SHIELD had perpetrated.

Leo Fitz.

Jemma would be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about him in the intervening years. Hadn’t kept up with his research and read his papers. Hadn’t wondered when she might one day slip open a black envelope to read his name.

She ran her thumb over the letters, her mind a million miles away. And then she crossed the living room to her desk, flicked the power button on her shredder, and obliterated the notecard, then the envelope for good measure.

She had her orders. Time to get to work.

  


Once upon a time, her bosses would have embedded Jemma in Fitz’s SHIELD lab, but there were only so many times one could do that without acquiring the unsavory label of a lab-hopper, and she’d already met her quota. Instead, she was going to have to get close to Fitz the old-fashioned way.

“Come here often?” she asked in her best sultry voice, sidling up beside him at a bar that was, frankly, disgusting. He took a sip of his pint, but didn’t look in her direction, as if he hadn’t heard her at all. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”

Fitz glanced at her out of his peripheral vision, then did a double-take. “Sorry-- sorry. Didn’t think you were talking to me.”

Jemma rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Who else would I be talking to?” She gestured up and down the empty bar, and he grimaced.

“Suppose you’re right.” Then, squinting a little: “Do I know you?”

Jemma had considered her strategy at length as she researched where she might track down Leo Fitz outside of his lab. Approaching him as a former colleague in need of a consult got into too many particulars about her current line of work. A nostalgic reunion with an old friend wasn’t an option, seeing as he’d hated her during the year they’d both been at SHIELD Academy. Ultimately, she’d concluded that the best thing to do was orchestrate a meeting borne entirely of coincidence-- two people who once almost knew each other, meeting again as if for the first time.

She shrugged, before gesturing to the bartender that she would have a beer as well. “There’s no way for me to know who you are or are not acquainted with, is there?”

Fitz frowned. “No, I definitely know you.” He swiveled on his stool to get a better look at her. “You’re Jemma Simmons.”

Jemma took just a hare too long to respond, but she didn’t think he’d notice. “Oh, yes, and you’re-- you’re Leopold Fitz, aren’t you? From the Academy?”

“Just Fitz, but yeah.” He turned to face forward again, both hands on his beer glass, his thumbs stroking patterns in the condensation. “You look different.” Then, before she could respond: “Not bad different, just… different.”

“Well, it _has_ been nearly ten years, hasn’t it?”

He nodded, and silence stretched between them. Just as Jemma was about to open her mouth, he spoke. “Where did you end up? I mean, I know you left the Academy to go take care of your parents--”

Right; that was the lie she’d told.

“--but what about now?"

So much for not delving into her current line of work. “I head up a biochem lab for another branch of government, so it’s classified.” She put her curled fingers to her lips and twisted them, as if turning a key, hoping she was succeeding at being flirtatious.

“Another branch, like--”

“You’re still at SHIELD, aren’t you? What are you doing at a seedy bar on a Tuesday afternoon-- stuck on a project?” In fact, she knew that he was _not_ stuck on a project. He was making great strides on a device that Hydra would very much like to get their hands on, hence her assignment. Still, it was only 4 o’clock on a Tuesday and he was at least one pint in. She took another long sip of hers, then signaled to the bartender for another round.

“Oi, watch what you’re calling seedy,” groused the bartender as he tossed a rag over his shoulder. “Fitz, mate, did you bring this bird here to badmouth my bar?”

“I didn’t bring-- she’s an old-- erm, former classmate of mine,” Fitz said. Then, turning to Jemma, he continued, “My friend Hunter here owns the bar. Only, seeing as nobody’s ever here--”

“Hey!”

“--I come by sometimes in the afternoons when I need to clear my head. Or get away from the idiots they try to assign me to work with.”

Jemma stifled a chuckle at his curmudgeonly tone. “Do you have a partner?”

Fitz took a sip of the fresh beer Hunter placed in front of him, and she did the same as she waited for him to answer. “No. Well, yes, at any given moment they’ve paired me with someone or another of below-average intelligence and sub-par experience. But I’ve never considered any of them to be a true partner. I suppose I work best alone.”

She nodded. “I seem to remember that from the Academy. I always wondered what might happen if we’d been paired up in a class-- but then, you’d probably have bit my head off, you hated me so.”

Fitz’s head jerked up. “I never hated you.”

“Oh, you don’t have to revise history just because we’re sitting together in a bar on a Tuesday, Fitz.”

“No, I--” His brows knitted together, and he paused. “I spent the better part of that first year trying to come up with something to say to you. And then, when I finally did, that’s when I heard you’d left the Academy.”

Well. That certainly wasn’t how she remembered things, and the discovery made something tighten in her chest. She finished off her beer. “So… what was it?”

“What was what?”

“You said you finally came up with something. What was it?”

Fitz looked down, tracing shapes on the sticky surface of the bar and smiling ruefully. “Something about dielectric polarization, I think.”

Jemma fought a grin, and it won. “That does sound fascinating.”

“Wow,” said Hunter dryly from across the bar. “You’re almost as much of a hopeless nerd as this one.”

“Sod off, Hunter.”

“No, no, it’s kind of cute, really.” He pulled a bottle of clear liquor from a shelf, then palmed three shot glasses in a row. “I’m bored, and Fitz’s right, nobody’s ever in here, so let’s toast, shall we? Shots are on me.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t--” Jemma began, just as Fitz said, “That’s not a good idea, Hunter.”

“Sure it is,” he said cheerfully, sliding a shot in front of each of them and raising his own. “To old friends!”

Jemma eyed Fitz as he spun the full shot glass neatly on the bar without spilling a drop. Should she take the shot? On the one hand, it was best to stay sober if she wanted to get as much information as she could out of her mark. On the other hand-- for some reason, she just wanted to. She wanted to hear more about Fitz at the Academy, about Fitz after the Academy. She wanted to hear what he had to say about dielectric polarization. She found that, oddly, she wanted to hear what he had to say about a lot of things.

Shaking off the voice in her head that told her it was a bad idea, she picked up her shot glass in one swift motion and held it aloft. “To old friends.”

Fitz’s thoughtful gaze met hers, and had his eyes been so blue, back when they’d known each other? They couldn’t possibly have been so blue. She would have noticed that.

He blinked at her, and then his lips quirked into a private smile, and he picked up his glass. “To...old friends.”

It turned out that what Fitz had to say about dielectric polarization actually _was_ fascinating, the kind of thing that kept her attention rapt as he spoke. He seemed eager to elaborate, and if Hunter kept feeding them free shots, they barely noticed, so tied up were they in what each other had to say about topic after topic.

When Jemma woke up with the dawn the next morning, the first thing she noticed was her pounding headache, followed by her dry mouth, followed closely by the warm weight slung across her stomach pinning her to the bed.

A bed, she realized, as she blinked open her eyes, that was not her own.

She peeked over her shoulder and when she determined it was indeed Fitz cuddled up behind her, she felt flooded with a sort of relief.

That is, until the panic set in.

Jemma knew two things:

  1. That her bosses at Hydra fully expected her to deliver Leo Fitz’s research, tied up like a gift in a pristine bow, by Friday at 9 a.m.
  2. That she thought she might really, really like him. And in that moment, she knew like lead in her gut that she didn’t have it in her to hurt him.



She shut her eyes tight, nestled back into the warmth of his embrace, and tried to let the rise and fall of his chest behind her lull her back to sleep. It was early. She had hours still before she had to deal with all that.

Hours still to pretend the last ten years had taken a different trajectory.

Hours still to believe that this was how they had always been meant to end up: his palm caressing her hip, his breath warming the nape of her neck, his presence making her feel, at last, at home. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Want to hang out on Tumblr? I'm unbreakablejemmasimmons over there!


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